


Redefined

by twofrontteethstillcrooked



Category: Half Life Trilogy - Sally Green
Genre: Angst, Blood, M/M, Offscreen Violence, POV Second Person, UST, snippetfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:52:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4194501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofrontteethstillcrooked/pseuds/twofrontteethstillcrooked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You should look away as he climbs from the water and you try to distract yourself with a description for what he is. <i>Beautiful</i> is not specific enough at all. </p><p>You have no talent with words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redefined

**Author's Note:**

> A moment after a battle, post- _Half Wild_. Likely to get jossed 3 paragraphs into the final book. ;)
> 
> 23 June 2015 snippetfic for Sit the Fuck Down and Write Month

After you have bathed you leave the safe house and go into the forest. You find Gabriel in the lake, scrubbing his bare arms, dropping into water up to his chin and rising again to scrub harder. Blood, you well know, can be difficult to wash away: sticky, syrupy, yet sometimes flaky, like shingle paint worn thin over seasons of harsh weather. It can almost seem like the blistered peel of a ghoulish burn, and you will inevitably bruise and scrape yourself in an effort to be clean.

He'll heal. You hate that he has to, though. He is lethal, capable, strong. The lake laps at his hipbones. You imagine the press of them in your hands and blink your eyes to dislodge the sensation. His head is tipped forward, the back of his neck exposed and pale. There is weary tension in the way he stands slightly hunched. Though you'd wager this forest is the safest place either of you has hidden in in some time, the vulnerability in his posture makes your throat clench. But you are not a predator he needs to fear.

(You are not tired, and your vision is eerily clear. The animal inside you rests, patient. Sated.)

You should go to him immediately and your legs, leaden, maintain the distance. The sun is setting, a streak of rose gold outlining a fracture between two large clouds, one moving off, one rumbling up to the horizon. It will storm again soon, as it has stormed every day for two weeks. The air is calm, the lake cold. You see him rinse one last time and he shivers as water threads down his lithe limbs and freckled shoulder blades.

He turns and begins to walk the few feet to the shore, to the rock where his knife gleams and his clothes are laid out, drying, leaking a diluted rust. There's a rip in his t-shirt, not from a wound but from his attempt to rub out the ugliest of the stains. Without soap some are impossible to remove.

You should look away as he climbs from the water and you try to distract yourself with a description for what he is. _Beautiful_ is not specific enough at all.

You have no talent with words.

He sits on his plaid blanket on the shore and pulls up his knees, wraps his arms around them. He puts his head on his knees, his face turned to the water. You think, for a second, he is chilled from the lake, until you see him take a breath that shudders and is held. The forest is not loud in late autumn, with fewer insects chirping or frogs croaking. Still you can hardly hear Gabriel crying. You can hardly bear it. It is the most hopeless sound, low and lonely.

When he thought you were dead he'd wept, he told you once. He has cried in your presence before but tonight is different. You are half a football pitch's length away and his exhaustion and sorrow envelop you like a sinking spell. You force yourself to move towards him with care, one silent step at a time. There is another blanket in your knapsack. At least you managed that.

What else can you do? Speak first? But you have cracked a twig beneath your foot. He does not react; he knew you would find him. You are beside him, kneeling. His skin is no longer wet. The ends of his hair are damp. You unfold the blanket and drape it around his shoulders. In a moment he wipes his hands over his face, shrugs the blanket more closely around himself.

You wait. When the rose gold shimmer gashed across the water has faded, he says, "She looked like Michele." A green flicker of lightning flares up inside the cloud on the horizon. "The hunter," he clarifies, voice rough, but you knew what he meant. You had seen her during the ambush, a too-young girl with a gun. Whatever the hunter had usually looked like or how old she'd been, she had targeted Gabriel. She had known his sister, or of her. Perhaps she had been Michele's executioner.

You think, someone else, a White Witch, had a gift like Gabriel's, and he had to slit her throat and disembowel her to survive. You think, the only way someone could have hurt him more would have been to transform into you. You think, had that happened, he might have killed himself, even if he had lived through the attack.

You cannot imagine this twice.

He curls his hands as though they ache. You want to unbend his thin, elegant fingers and trace the lines of his palms with your fingertips. Here is a word, an emotion: desire, which startles you with its existence, its ferocity. You reach out, slowly, to tuck a lock of his hair behind his ear. He closes his eyes.

And oh, you did not know. That's what you realize, sitting near enough the heat from his body touches yours. You thought what you felt for him was small, plain; you might have likened it to something sturdy, unobtrusive, something to be put in a pocket and carried anywhere, an ordinary talisman, a pebble plucked from any old beach.

All those months, not letting yourself remember your hand and his lashed and staked together, your mingled blood dripping hot between them, nor his mouth beneath yours warm and sweet. Passion unnamed and therefore dismissed. How much he knows you, every part of you, more deeply than anyone else ever has or will, and loves you regardless: yet you refused to dwell or define. You thought friend -- kind, steadfast, apart.

You thought friend. But you did not think _dearest_ , not how you sigh it in your mind as you turn his face towards yours and brush tears from his cheek with your thumb. When he opens his eyes you are as ever at a loss for what to say but action will serve you better.

There are many things beyond this forest to fear. It is dark but for a sliver of moonlight and the cloud to cloud lightning rolling closer, and tomorrow you will be hunted as you were yesterday and this morning, as you will be until your father is avenged and perhaps beyond. But you will hunt as well. You will not fight alone.

Please forgive me, you think, tracing your thumb over Gabriel's bottom lip. When you kiss him, you do so as quietly as he once kissed you. You know he will not resist and you know he will not think this is anything but comfort and you know he will think this is you just pretending and you kiss him anyway, because you must start somewhere. Words are not enough. You have to tell the whole truth a first time and again, again, every time you are with him, every chance, every way, and your truth is the enormity of what you feel for him, your most special, loyal, gentle, brave, precious friend.

Your head is in Gabriel's hands, your hands are in his hair, his mouth under yours is so soft, so much warmer and sweeter than you remembered. After many minutes he pulls away to study your eyes, the gold in his glittering, shifting as he decides.

"Nathan," he finally whispers against your mouth, and you smile. He loves you; he knows now you love him too.

**Author's Note:**

> hey denial is not just a river in Egypt and there's someone Nathan was almost deliberately not thinking about here and that's mostly because I didn't want to think about her, not here, at any rate


End file.
